Uniform resource locators (URLs) are currently used to provide addressing of and access to resources on the public Internet and private intranets. These Internet/intranet URLs allow client systems of the network to request the documents or other resources from servers of the network by reference to the URL. The available resources generally include HTML Web pages as well as audio files and movie files that can be downloaded to a user's machine. The URLs for resources typically are displayed within Web pages either as hypertext links or as graphics hot spots and allow users to navigate the various resources available on the network. URLs can also be entered manually by a user in order to connect to a specific resource. When accessed, Web pages typically are loaded by a web browser, interpreted and then displayed to the user. Audio files and movie files, on the other hand, are usually downloaded as discrete files to the user's system and then played in a separate window using some form of playback application. In general, such audio and movie files provide a time-based medium understood and interpreted by the playback application to generate audio sounds and video displays.
Conventional movie playback applications include QUICK TIME, available from APPLE COMPUTERS, and VIDEO FOR WINDOWS, available from MICROSOFT. QUICK TIME VR, also available from APPLE COMPUTERS, is a playback application that plays files expressed in a spatial-based medium to allow viewing of a scene from multiple viewpoints. One use of VIDEO FOR WINDOWS is described in an article "AVI Files with Hot Spots", Technical Articles: Multimedia--Microsoft Development Library. This article describes specifying hot-spots for audio-video interleaved (AVI) files where the hot spots can be drawn on AVI files and saved in hot-spot information files which can be specified as a parameter when the AVI is played. The described AVI hot-spot functionality allows specifying beginning and ending frames for each hot spot, as long as two hot spots do not have the same beginning or ending frames. The described AVI hot-spot functionality also allows executing viewer commands and calling stand-alone applications when a hot spot is selected as well as to continue, stop or jump within the AVI file being played.
There are additional movie-type displays that can be created through the use of executable languages such as the use of JAVA applets to animate graphics. In addition, POINTCAST can be used to broadcast static screens over the public Internet or private intranets that are updated to provide a slide show presentation. Other conventional presentation software applications allow a user to build video into a presentation including DIRECTOR, available from MACROMEDIA, which allows a user to program a presentation which can include video. Relatively new technologies are also available that integrate common television with Internet web activity to allow a user to access the public Internet or private intranets using a web browser and to display the web browser's output on a television.
A problem with conventional audio files, movie files and other time-based media and their associated playback applications is that a discontinuity in the user's ability to navigate network resources is created during playback. This discontinuity is created by the user's not being allowed to activate URLs for other resources from within the playback window during playback. For example, playback of a conventional movie file could cause a URL to be displayed as text within the video, but the URL would not be an active hypertext link. If the user wanted to follow the displayed URL, the user would need to invoke a Web browser and manually enter the URL.